Method and system for suggesting search engine keywords

Abstract

A search engine receives a search query having one or more keywords. The documents in the result set from that search query are analyzed to identify one or more additional keywords that further segment, or separate, the initial result set. These additional keywords are presented to the user who then selects whether to include or exclude documents matching the additional keywords. In this way, the number of documents in the initial result set is reduced in a relatively quick and effortless manner.

Description

FIELD OF THE INVENTION [0001] The present invention relates generally to searching electronic information and, more particularly, to generating a result set in response to a query. BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0002] As more and more information is created and stored in electronic format, and as legacy paper documents are converted into electronic format, finding relevant data among this increasingly large body of information becomes increasingly difficult. The volume of information accessible via the Internet, for example, continues to grow at an exponential rate. Furthermore, as storage technologies have improved in capacity and performance, the amount of information that may be stored on a user computer, or otherwise made accessible via a local network, also continues to increase. [0003] To assist users in finding relevant data among these large bodies of information, programs or services referred to as search engines have been developed to generate in response to a user query a “...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

The invention aims to improve search results by analyzing a result set to identify additional keywords that can narrow down the result set and improve the initial query. This can be done by performing a search and identifying additional keywords that would effectively bifurcate the result set into two similar subsets, allowing the user to easily eliminate one of the subsets. The process can be iterated multiple times to further narrow down the result set. The technical effect of the invention is to provide a more efficient and manageable result set in response to a search query.

Problems solved by technology

As more and more information is created and stored in electronic format, and as legacy paper documents are converted into electronic format, finding relevant data among this increasingly large body of information becomes increasingly difficult.

Significant efforts have been directed toward improving the search algorithms and methodologies utilized by search engines similar programs / services, predominantly driven by the increase in the volume of information and the resulting increase in difficulty in paring down potential matching data to that data most likely to satisfy a user's query.

In many cases, however, a basic impediment to the ability of a search engine to generate an optimal result set is the initial quality of the query input by a user.

However, the amount of skill required to generate complex queries in this manner often exceeds the abilities of many users, and as a consequence, many users are unable to take advantage of advanced query formulation techniques to properly focus their queries to retrieve the best information.

However, in many instances, simple keyword searching initially returns a large number of matching documents, and often requires a user to enter additional keywords to narrow down the search to a more manageable result set.

Determining what keywords would be most useful in paring down the search results is often left to the user, and can either result in insufficient narrowing, or narrowing in a manner that excludes potentially relevant information.

Even with such capabilities, however, search queries involving common terms often produce result sets having thousands or tens of thousands of matching documents.

This amount of information is typically too large to be useful as searching through each individual document is prohibitively time consuming.

As a result, some relevant documents may be missed by a user when scanning through a large number of irrelevant documents.

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